583084

research-article2015
MIL0010.1177/0305829815583084MillenniumBleiker

MILLENNIUM Journal of International Studies

Article

Millennium: Journal of

Pluralist Methods for Visual

International Studies
2015, Vol. 43(3) 872­–890
© The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/0305829815583084
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Roland Bleiker
University of Queensland, Australia

Abstract
Images play an increasingly important role in global politics but pose significant and so far
largely unexplored methodological challenges. Images are different from words. They circulate
in ever more complex and rapid ways. I argue that the political significance of images is best
understood through an interdisciplinary framework that relies on multiple methods, even if
they are at times incompatible. I defend such a pluralist approach as both controversial and
essential: controversial because giving up a unitary standard of evidence violates social scientific
conventions; essential because such a strategy offers the best opportunity to assess how images
work across their construction, content and impact. I counter fears of relativism, arguing that the
hubris of indisputable knowledge is more dangerous than a clash of different perspectives. The
very combination of incompatible methods makes us constantly aware of our own contingent
standpoints, thus increasing the self-reflectiveness required to understand the complexities of
visual global politics.

Keywords
international theory, methods in politics, visual global politics

Introduction
Images play an increasingly important role in global politics, so much so that some speak
of a ‘pictorial turn’.1 Our understanding of terrorism, for instance, is inevitably intertwined
with how images dramatically depict the events and actors in question and with how politi-
cians and the public respond to these depictions. Images are, of course, not new, nor have

  1. W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

Corresponding author:
Roland Bleiker, Professor of International Relations, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Qld 4072,
Australia.
Email: bleiker@uq.edu.au
Bleiker 873

they necessarily replaced words as the main means of communication. But images are now
produced and circulated in ever faster and more complex ways and in the context of a rap-
idly changing global media economy. Understanding the political nature and impact of
images has thus become more challenging too. Several methodological problems stand out.
Images work at numerous overlapping levels: across national boundaries and between
the physical and the mental world. Images come in still and moving versions, each pos-
ing unique methodological challenges.2 Images work differently from words. They are of
a non-verbal nature but we, as scholars, need words to assess their political significance.
Something inevitably gets lost in this process. The meaning of images is always depend-
ent on context and interpretation. This is why there is always a certain excess to images,
a kind of ‘surplus value’ that escapes our attempts to define them definitively.3 Add to
this that images often work through emotions, which have traditionally been seen as
personal and internal phenomena that pose similarly thorny methodological challenges.
A paradoxical situation emerges: while international relations scholars increasingly
recognise the importance of images, few if any of them contemplate the methodological
issues at stake. Those who work on images tend to come from post-structural back-
grounds and the perception here is, as Lene Hansen put it, that methods ‘don’t mix’ with
post-structuralism.4 W.J.T. Mitchell, perhaps the leading proponent of the pictorial turn,
simply says that ‘no method is being offered here’.5 This is not to say that there is no
work on visual methods. There are, indeed, numerous methods textbooks that either
contain visual components6 or focus exclusively on visual methods,7 but they rarely
engage political and international themes.
The purpose of this article is to engage this gap and to offer a methodological frame-
work for the study of images in global politics. One point is immediately clear: the poli-
tics of images is far too complex to be assessed through a single method.
I thus begin by outlining the need to draw on a wide range of methods that are not
usually used in combination with each other, including ethnography, semiotics, discourse
analysis, content analysis and experimental surveys. Building on Gillian Rose, I show

  2. William A. Callahan, ‘The Visual Turn in IR: Documentary Filmmaking as a Critical Method’,
Millennium: Journal of International Studies 43, no. 3 (2015): 891–910.
 3. W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 2005), 76–110.
  4. Lene Hansen, Security as Practice: Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War (New York:
Routledge, 2006), xviii.
 5. Mitchell, Picture Theory, 48; see also James Elkins and Kristi McGuire, eds, Theorizing
Visual Studies: Writing Through the Discipline (New York: Routledge, 2013); James Elkins,
Visual Studies: A Sceptical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2003).
  6. Uwe Flick, Qualitative Sozialforschung: Eine Einführung (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2002), 199–
242; Bruce L. Berg, Qualitative Research Methods for the Social Sciences (Boston, MA:
Pearson, 2007), 192–203; David Silverman, Interpreting Qualitative Data: Methods for
Analysing Talk, Text and Interaction (London: Sage, 2001), 241–68.
 7. Michael Emmison and Phillip Smith, Researching the Visual: Images, Objects, Contexts
and Interactions in Social and Cultural Inquiry (London: Sage, 2000); Keith Kenney, Visual
Communication Research Design (New York: Routledge, 2009).
874 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 43(3)

how multiple methods can assess images across a range of sites and modalities, from the
production, content and impact of images to their technological, compositional and
social dimensions.8 Such a move seems commonsensical and uncontroversial at first
sight, but it is actually riddled with obstacles. For one, only a few researchers possess the
methodological skills to navigate across such a wide range of methods. Their work is
rendered even more difficult by an antagonistic opposition that still divides quantitative
and qualitative approaches to international relations research.
The biggest obstacle to a truly multi-method approach to the political study of images
is, however, not of a practical but of an epistemological nature. Using methods as diverse
as discourse analysis and quantitative surveys can only be done if each of these methods
is given the chance to work according to its own logic.
I thus argue for a heterogeneous combination of seemingly incompatible methods.
Expressed in other words, multiple methods should be used even if, or precisely because,
they are not compatible with each other. I draw on assemblage theory and the concept of
rhizomes9 to defend an approach I believe is both necessary and controversial: necessary
because it is the most convincing way to understand the complex links between images
and politics; controversial because such a strategy breaks with deeply entrenched social
scientific conventions that require each methodological component to behave according
to the same coherent overall logic.10
I illustrate the issues at stake by engaging a particularly important challenge: the ques-
tion of impact. Images clearly matter in global politics but how exactly do we know?
Prevailing social scientific models of cause and effect are of limited use. Only in rare
instances do images directly cause political events. In most cases the impact of images is
more diffuse. There are, for instance, clear links between the dramatic images of the ter-
rorist attacks on 11 September 2001, the highly emotional rhetoric of good versus evil
that emerged in response, and the ensuing war on terror. But these links would be very
difficult – if not impossible – to assess with cause–effect models. An assemblage-inspired
approach relies on multiple methods to appreciate how images perform the political in
more indirect ways. Images establish what William Connolly called ‘the conditions of
possibility’.11 This is to say that they frame what can be seen, thought and said. In doing
so, they delineate what is and is not politically possible. Expressed in other words: how
we visualise the political shapes the very nature of politics.
The final part of the article addresses the charge of relativism that inevitably comes
up in the context of a pluralist approach that abandons the notion of a single standard of
evidence. The fear here is that once we give up a fixed set of criteria to judge the world,

  8. Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Methods

(London: Sage, 2008), 13–26.
 9. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1996).
10. See Manuel DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social
Complexity (London: Continuum, 2006), 10–11.
11. William E. Connolly, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).
Bleiker 875

we will no longer be able to advance a coherent and effective scientific or political posi-
tion. I show that this fear is misplaced. I demonstrate that genuine multidisciplinarity not
only offers more accurate and self-reflective insights into visual world politics but also
serves to check what is one of the biggest problems in international relations research,
that is, unchecked reification: the tendency to uphold and rehearse one subjective posi-
tion to the point where it becomes so widely and seemingly objectively accepted that its
subjective origins become erased.
A brief disclaimer is in order before I start. My prime focus lies less on the politics of
images than on the methodological challenge of understanding them. This is the case
because an appropriate methodological framework offers the very precondition for
understanding how images work politically. Given the elusive nature of images, a plu-
ralist approach is particularly essential. But the so gained methodological insights have
implications that go beyond the study of visual politics. The world is and always has
been far too complex to be understood through social scientific methods alone, no matter
how sophisticated they are. We need the full spectrum of knowledge to understand and
face the challenges that make up global politics. It is in this sense that my inquiry into
images contributes to broader ongoing debates – played out in the pages of this Millennium
special issue – about how to widen the methodological purview of international relations
research.

Methodological Challenges in the Study of Images

There is something unique about images. They have a special status. They generate
excitement and anxieties. ‘Why is it’, Mitchell asks, ‘that people have such strange atti-
tudes towards images?’12 Why is it that audiences are given a stern warning before they
see shocking images of, say, war or terror or bodily mutilation? Why not the same warn-
ing with verbal depictions?13 Consider how news outlets that published images of the
bombing of the Boston marathon in 2013 felt compelled to add notes that read ‘Warning:
This image may contain graphic or objectionable content’.14 No such warning was given
with language-based articles of the same event, even though they described the horror of
the attack in equally great detail. What makes images seemingly more dangerous and
powerful than words?
There is, indeed, something unique about images. They work differently from words.
They are, by definition, different from words. Whether they be photographs, films or
visual art, images always contain a certain excess, a part of them that escapes our under-
standing. Images do not speak for themselves. They need to be interpreted. And this
interpretation contains values that inevitably have as much to do with the values of the
interpreter than the content of the image itself. Roland Barthes writes of a ‘connoted
message’, of how an image is read and how it fits into existing practices of knowledge

12. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 7.

13. Lene Hansen, ‘Annual Michael Hintze Lecture in International Security’, lecture, University
of Sydney, 20 February 2014.
14. Christine Haugney, ‘News Media Weigh Use of Photos of Carnage’, New York Times, 18
April 2013.
876 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 43(3)

and communication.15 Consider how an early modern icon of the Madonna and child
would have been perceived differently at the time it was painted than today, when the
very same image is seen in a museum in St Petersburg.
Part of what makes images unique is that they evoke, appeal to and generate emo-
tions. Pictures of traumatic events, such as terrorist attacks, natural catastrophes or aero-
plane crashes, are seemingly able to capture the unimaginable. This is why news coverage
of such traumas is frequently accompanied by images, as if they could provide readers/
viewers with a type of emotional insight that words cannot convey. But emotions are
notoriously difficult to assess. They have traditionally been seen as internal and private
phenomena: you can, by definition, not know how I feel. All you can know is how I tell
you how I feel. This is why Neta Crawford notes that emotions are ‘deeply internal’,
making it very difficult to isolate or distinguish what a ‘genuine’ emotion may indeed
be.16 Quantifying emotions is difficult. Labelling and measuring them, even in qualita-
tive terms, is also a delicate process. That these problems exist at the level of the indi-
vidual is significant enough, yet the difficulties are magnified when it comes to examining
the role of images – and the emotion they engender – in the context of global politics.
These conceptual challenges are exacerbated by the ever increasing speed and complex-
ity through which images circulate. Images seem to be everywhere. It is not just that global
media networks now cover news events 24 hours a day. The issue goes well beyond the
influential CNN-effect.17 The circulation of news is not just global but transcends global
media networks. Even traditional newspapers – from the New York Times to Le Monde, Der
Spiegel and the Guardian – are meanwhile multimedia organisations with a substantial
internet presence.18 They cater to an audience that consumes news increasingly through
smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices. Add to this that the visual field has become
increasingly democratised. Anyone with a mobile device can now take images and distrib-
ute them via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr and other social media tools. The results
are fundamentally new interactive dynamics that are rooted in various networks and webs
of relations.19 Look at the recent Arab spring uprising in Egypt. One of the most remarkable
episodes occurred when a young woman blogger called Aliaa Elmahdy posted a nude pho-
tograph of herself on her blog. She did so to protest against gender discrimination in Egypt
and to call for more personal freedom, including sexual autonomy. Her private-cum-public

15. Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977),
17–19.
16. Neta C. Crawford, ‘The Passion of World Politics: Propositions on Emotions and Emotional
Relationships’, International Security 24, no. 4 (2000): 118.
17. Piers Robinson, The CNN Effect: The Myth of News Foreign Policy and Intervention (New
York: Routledge, 2002).
18. Katharine Viener, ‘The Rise of the Reader: Journalism in the Age of the Open Web’, Guardian,
9 Oct. 2013.
19. Paolo Favero, ‘Learning to Look beyond the Frame: Reflections on the Changing Meaning
of Images in the Age of Digital Media Practices’, Visual Studies 29, no. 2 (2014): 166.
For particularly insightful reflections on the issues at stake, see David Campbell’s website
‘Transforming the Visual Economy’, https://www.david-campbell.org (accessed March
2015).
Bleiker 877

photograph circulated around the world. It caused extensive public protests at home and
created a wave of feminist solidarity around the world.
There are significant methodological challenges entailed in understanding this rapidly
changing world of visual global politics. Consider, as an example, one of the most widely
practised visual methods: content analysis. With traditional media outlets a content analy-
sis is fairly straightforward. One can, for instance, identify politically significant visual
patterns by systematically analysing front-page newspaper coverage of particular issues
over an extended period of time.20 Doing so will become more and more difficult.
Newspapers are now as much online as print media: website headlines often change by the
hour or even minute, so much so that it is no longer possible to identify images that visually
symbolise the day’s key news. Retracing this online coverage from past years is far more
difficult than retrieving front pages of past print editions. Methodological issues get expo-
nentially more difficult when it comes to applying content analysis to moving images and
to internet sites, where there is a limitless number of images. Finding the equivalent units
of analysis in such a fluid multimedia environment is thus enormously difficult.21

Towards a Pluralistic Methodological Framework

So far I have pointed out that the elusive nature of images and the speed and complexity
through which they circulate pose significant methodological challenges. The world of
visual politics is, indeed, so complex that there is only one logical conclusion: to recog-
nise that there is no one method, no matter how thorough or systematic, that can provide
us with authentic insights into what images are or how they function.
The beginning of my argument, then, is simple: I advocate drawing on multiple, diverse
and even incompatible methods. In doing so, I employ Gillian Rose’s insightful work on
visual methods. Rose distinguishes between three different sites: the production of an image,
the image itself and how it is seen by various audiences.22 Overlapping with this triptych are
three modalities: technological, compositional and social. Each of these sites and modalities
requires entirely different methods, which is why I now discuss each of them briefly.
First is the production of images. Methods here are linked to technical as much as
interpretative tools. Part of the task involves understanding how images – still or moving
– are taken: not only what kind of technical processes and choices are involved, but also
what political and ethical consequences follow.23 This matters greatly, for instance, when
it comes to photojournalists taking pictures of war or of victims of famine. Epitomising
the dilemmas at stake here is the much discussed suicide of Kevin Carter, who struggled

20. See Roland Bleiker, David Campbell, Emma Hutchison and Xzarina Nicholson, ‘The Visual
Dehumanization of Refugees’, Australian Journal of Political Science 48, no. 3 (2013):
398–416.
21. Susan Keith, Carol B. Schwalbe and B. William Silcock, ‘Comparing War Images across
Media Platforms: Methodological Challenges for Content Analysis’, Media, War & Conflict
31, no. 1 (2010): 90–3.
22. Rose, Visual Methodologies, 13–26.
23. See Rose Wiles, Amanda Coffey, Judy Robinson and Sue Heath, ‘Anonymisation and Visual
Images: Issues of Respect, “Voice” and Protection’, International Journal of Social Research
Methodology 15, no. 1 (2012): 41–53.
878 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 43(3)

with the ethical implications of having won a Pulitzer Prize for his photograph of the
Sudan famine in 1994.24 The photograph, which depicted a vulture watching a starving
child, created a major public reaction as well as numerous discussions about the ethics of
photojournalism. Carter’s iconic photo is an extreme case of a confrontational image, but
every picture of a famine inevitably raises questions. What kind of politics and ethics are
entailed in the depiction of misery? Who views and who is being looked at? Who decides
what is visually newsworthy and what are the consequences? To what extent is the global
circulation of images linked to and further entrenches prevailing power relations?
Challenges here involve understanding the processes through which images are pro-
duced, selected and, finally, make it into the news – from front-page newspaper coverage
to television film coverage to new media sources that go ‘viral’ on the web. The methods
needed to understand the issues at stake include, amongst others, interviews and ethno-
graphic inquiries.
Second is the challenge of understanding the images themselves – that is, their actual
content. The methods required here are very different. They range from semiotics (which
explores how images work through symbols and signs) to discourse analyses (which
examines the power relations involved) and content analysis (which empirically meas-
ures patterns of how images depict the world). Numerous complexities are involved in
the respective inquiries. For one, it is imperative to investigate how images interact with
other mediums and objects. There are macro and micro dimensions to this task. At the
macro level there is the intertwinement of images with numerous material, cultural, sym-
bolic and other factors, including media environments and, in a more general sense, the
entire sociopolitical context within which images gain meaning.25 At the more micro
level there is the need to investigate the link between visual and verbal representations.
Mitchell speaks of ‘image–text’ constellations and goes as far as arguing that ‘all media
are mixed media’,26 that there is nothing that is either purely verbal or purely visual.
Examples of scholarly works that examine these complex visual dimensions of global
politics are far too numerous to list here. Recent examples include work by David
Campbell on famine, Lene Hansen on torture, Emma Hutchison on trauma, Frank Möller
on peace, David Shim on North Korea and Sharon Sliwinski on human rights.27

24. Barbie Zelizer, About to Die: How News Images Move the Public (Oxford: Oxford University
Press), 166–8.
25. Mitchell, Picture Theory, 3; Tony Schirato and Jen Webb, Reading the Visual (Crow’s Nest,
NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2004), 17–21.
26. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 5.
27. David Campbell, ‘The Iconography of Famine’, in Picturing Atrocity: Reading Photographs
in Crisis, eds Geoffrey Batchen, Nancy K. Miller and Jay Prosser (London: Reaktion Books,
2011), 79–92; Lene Hansen, ‘How Images Make World Politics: International Icons and
the Case of Abu Ghraib’, Review of International Studies 41, no 2 (2014): 263–88; Emma
Hutchison, ‘A Global Politics of Pity? Disaster Imagery and the Emotional Construction of
Solidarity after the 2004 Asian Tsunami’, International Political Sociology 8, no. 1 (2014):
1–19; Frank Möller, Visual Peace: Images, Spectatorship, and the Politics of Violence
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013); David Shim, Visual Politics and North Korea: Seeing Is
Believing (London: Routledge, 2014); Sharon Sliwinski, Human Rights in Camera (Chicago,
IL: Chicago University Press, 2011).
Bleiker 879

The third site relates to how audiences receive images, or as I prefer to put it: the
actual impact of images. And here, too, a different set of methods is required. They
include audience interviews and observations. Other options are quantitative surveys that
assess attitudinal reactions to images or neuroscientific lab experiments that measure
physical responses to visual stimuli. Given the importance of understanding the impact
of images, I will return to this topic in more detail later in the article. For now, let me give
just one brief example of impact studies: investigations that assess the political percep-
tion of and response to images of suffering that circulate in global media networks.28
At first sight it seems commonsensical to rely on such a broad set of methods to under-
stand the construction, content and impact of images. Many method scholars acknowl-
edge the need for pluralism and recognise that, by extension, their own approach is a
‘necessary but not sufficient methodology’.29 A content analysis, for instance, can identify
important visual patterns but say nothing about the impact of images, just as a survey
experiment can gauge impact but offer no knowledge of the origin or content of images.
This is why Sarah Pink called for more collaborative and interdisciplinary approaches to
visual research.30 She too advocates a form of collaboration ‘whereby disciplines might
learn from each other without seeking narrative folds to assert the supremacy of their own
discipline at the expense of others’.31 Numerous other scholars agree and argue against
analytically separating sensory domains.32 David Silverman stresses that because the vis-
ual works on numerous levels none of the data generated by specific methods ‘are more
real or more true than the others’.33 Sarah Elwood argues for a ‘diverse range of visualiza-
tion practices and visual methods’.34 Mitchell advises ‘against putting all eggs in one
disciplinary basket’ and advocates criss-crossing links between fields such as art history,
philosophy, media studies, psychology and anthropology.35
While commonsensical in principle, the actual application of a pluralist methodologi-
cal approach to visual global politics is far more complex and difficult. Few international
relations scholars try to combine the types of methods required to assess the comprehen-
sive dimensions of visual politics. There is, for one, the practical challenge of acquiring

28. Birgitta Höijer, ‘The Discourse of Global Compassion: The Audience and Media Reporting
of Human Suffering’, Media, Culture and Society 26, no. 4 (2004): 513–31; Paul Slovic,
‘“If I Look at the Mass I Will Never Act”: Psychic Numbing and Genocide’, Judgment and
Decision Making 2, no. 2 (2006): 79–95.
29. Theo Van Leeuwen and Cary Jewitt, eds, The Handbook of Visual Analysis (London: Sage,
2004), 5.
30. Sarah Pink, ‘Interdisciplinary Agendas in Visual Research: Re-situating Visual Anthropology’,
Visual Studies 18, no. 2 (2003): 179.
31. Ibid.
32. Jennifer Mason and Katherine Davies, ‘Coming to Our Senses? A Critical Approach to
Sensory Methodology’, Qualitative Research 9, no. 5 (2009): 600–1.
33. David Silverman, Interpreting Qualitative Data: Methods for Analysing Talk, Text and
Interaction (London: Sage, 2001), 194.
34. Sarah Elwood, ‘Geographic Information Science: Visualization, Visual Methods, and the
Geoweb’, Progress in Human Geography 35, no. 3 (2010): 406.
35. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 5.
880 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 43(3)

a highly diverse set of methodological skills. Scholars who employ, say, discourse analy-
sis rarely have the skills to conduct large-scale quantitative surveys. Likewise, research-
ers who, say, do lab experiments are not usually equipped to conduct a semiology. The
breadth of methodological skill necessary to conduct interdisciplinary visual research is,
as Luc Pauwels notes, truly daunting.36 But there is more at stake than the challenge of
acquiring methodological skills.
Those who venture further and engage in genuine multidisciplinary research face sig-
nificant obstacles. They might be considered ‘thin’ since they disperse their efforts across
a range of complex bodies of knowledge and thus seem to lack the kind of detailed
insights that only specialists can provide. As a result, they risk not only being seen as
‘amateurs’ but also missing out on the complexities of disciplinary debates and insights.37
In addition, such scholars face publishing practices by academic journals that still largely
run along – and evaluate according to – disciplinary standards. It is symptomatic, then,
that one of the most prominent scholars in visual culture – James Elkins – stresses that
‘the existence of borders, and the competencies they enclose, are what gives sense to our
peregrine scholarship’.38
Most significantly, multidisciplinary scholars in international relations are met with a
deeply entrenched antagonistic dualism that continues to separate those advocating qual-
itative from those advocating quantitative methods. The divide between these traditions
is enforced not only by different methodological trainings, but also by a range of episte-
mological assumptions that seem to make genuine cross-method inquiries difficult. One
of the most influential methods textbooks reduces social science to the task of learning
‘facts about the real world’. Both quantitative and qualitative methods are meant to oper-
ate according to the same logic: they have to be based on hypotheses that ‘need to be
evaluated empirically before they can make a contribution to knowledge’.39
Such methodological approaches have meanwhile been widely critiqued for their
problematic positivism. But their impact remains remarkably strong. In much research in
the social sciences there is still a deeply held dualism between positivist and post-posi-
tivist approaches, a dualism that mistakenly either validates or discredits methods
according to certain epistemological positions. Consider two brief examples. Content
analysis often remains wedded to a scientific ethos that stresses the method’s ‘objective,
systematic and quantitative’ qualities, even though the actual set-up of the experiments
is inevitably contingent on numerous highly subjective decisions.40 Such an ethos of
scientific objectivity makes it difficult to embrace more interpretative methods at the
same time. But resistance comes from other sides too. More interpretative scholars can

36. Luc Pauwels, ‘Visual Sociology Reframed: An Analytical Synthesis and Discussion of Visual
Methods in Social and Cultural Research’, Sociological Methods and Research 38, no. 4
(2010): 568.
37. Pink, ‘Interdisciplinary Agendas’, 179.
38. James Elkins, ‘Nine Modes of Interdisciplinarity for Visual Studies’, Journal of Visual
Culture 2, no. 2 (2003): 236.
39. Gary G. King, Robert O. Keohane and Sydney Verba, Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific
Interference in Qualitative Research (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 6, 16.
40. Kimberly A. Neuendorf, The Content Analysis Guidebook (London: Sage, 2002), 10–12.
Bleiker 881

be just as suspicious of science as scientists are of interpretation. Consider my own expe-

rience. I identify with post-structural and related methods, but recently employed quan-
titative tools for work on images, including survey experiments and content analysis.41
The reaction from like-mined post-structural colleagues was all too often one of deep
concern that by embracing quantitative methods I would buy into a positivist epistemol-
ogy and lose my ability to critically analyse political phenomena. I was accused of ‘sell-
ing out to the enemy’.

Method, Methodology, Assemblages

The practical challenges to a pluralistic methodological approach are significant but can be
overcome. Extra training can provide scholars with the skills needed to employ a wider
range of methods. The hostility between scholars advocating quantitative and those advo-
cating qualitative approaches can, equally, be overcome through a mutual learning process.
The more significant obstacles, however, are of a more substantive nature.
A genuinely interdisciplinary and pluralistic approach to the study of images in global
politics can only be employed once one abandons the idea that all methods have to operate
according to the same rules and standards of evidence; that is, once one abandons the notion
of an overarching framework that can regulate all the various inquiries. As opposed to pre-
vailing assumptions, there is no logical link between certain methods and certain epistemo-
logical positions. Methods are tools to understand the world and epistemologies are
assumptions about the values that should be attached to the knowledge that these tools
produce.
This is why methods cannot be employed or understood without a proper engagement
with methodologies – a point that is being made increasingly by international relations
scholars working on critical approaches to methods. John Law and John Urry, Lene
Hansen, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Patrick Jackson, Michael Shapiro, Claudia Aradau and
Jef Huysmans all stress that methods are inevitably intertwined with the strategies that
these methods employ and the context within which they are carried out.42 The task of
methodologies is to challenge the idea of methods as neutral techniques and to reflect
upon the choices and implications that they embody. Implied – and at times explicitly
articulated – in these positions is the idea that one can embark on systematic and rigorous
research even while one accepts that there are several, and at times even incompatible,
models of doing so. Although still fairly controversial in international relations, such

41. Bleiker et al., ‘Visual Dehumanization of Refugees’.

42. John Law and John Urry, ‘Enacting the Social’, Economy and Society 33, no. 3 (2004):
397; Hansen, Security as Practice, ix; Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies:
Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books, 2012), ix; Patrick Thaddeus Jackson,
The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations (London: Routledge, 2011), 25; Michael
J. Shapiro, Methods and Nations: Cultural Governance and the Indigenous Subject (New
York: Routledge, 2003); Michael J. Shapiro, Studies in Trans-disciplinary Method: After the
Aesthetic Turn (New York: Routledge, 2013); Claudia Aradau and Jef Huysmans, ‘Critical
Methods in International Relations: The Politics of Techniques, Devices and Acts’, European
Journal of International Relations 20, no. 3 (2014): 598.
882 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 43(3)

critical positions on methodology are not new. They have long been debated in the phi-
losophy of science or in quantum and complexity theory. Consider, just as an example,
how Paul Feyerabend argued 40 years ago that the numerous procedures that make up
the sciences have no common structure and that, as a result, ‘successful research does not
obey general standards; it relies now on one trick, now on another’.43 He presents the
violation of existing basic rules as the very process through which science progresses –
not towards a new and better paradigm, but towards a recognition that science, and the
methods it applies, is always incomplete and bound by its social context.
The concept of assemblage thinking provides a particularly useful way of anchoring
a pluralist approach to the study of visual politics.44 It offers the kind of framework that
can assess how images work in intertwined ways across their construction, content and
impact. While ideally suited to capturing the complex politics of images, an assemblage
approach has wider implications for the study of global politics.
Assemblages can be defined in their opposition to totalities. The latter are systems of
thought based on relations of interiority. Manuel DeLanda stresses that in such systems
each component has to behave according to a central logic that structures the movement
of parts.45 The above positivist methods textbook is a key example of such a coherent and
clearly delineated system: it is structured according to an overall logic, that of social sci-
ence as a science. To make sense and fit in, each methodological component of this
system has to operate according to the same principles: those of testable hypotheses.
Methods that do not fit these criteria are seen as unscientific and illegitimate.
Assemblages offer a clear alternative to totalities and thus a conceptual base for a
pluralist approach to the study of images. This is the case because an assemblage, accord-
ing to DeLanda, is structured by relations of exteriority: the properties and behaviour of
its components neither have to explain the whole nor fit into its overall logic.46
Heterogeneity is a key feature here, for each component is both linked and autonomous.
Law and Urry as well as Aradau and Huysmans speak of ‘messy’ methods, but this does
not mean that individual inquiries cannot be, at the same time, meticulous, thorough and
systematic.47 The key is that the criteria by which they operate are seen as being inde-
pendent of their specific purpose. An embrace of a post-positivist epistemology is an
inevitable side-product of assemblages: an attempt to refuse totalities and embrace life
and the political as a decentred, heterogeneous alignment of emerging and constantly

43. Paul Feyerabend, Against Method, 3rd edn (London: Verso, 2002), 1, 18, 160.
44. Here I draw on and expand previous engagements with assemblage thinking. See Roland
Bleiker, ‘Visual Assemblages: From Causality to Conditions of Possibility’, in Reassembling
International Theory: Assemblage Thinking and International Relations, eds Michele Acuto
and Simon Curtis (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014), 75–82; Roland Bleiker, ‘Multidisciplinarity’,
in Routledge Handbook of International Political Sociology, eds Xavier Guillaume, Pinar
Bilgin and Mark B. Salter (Routledge: Abingdon, forthcoming).
45. DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society, 10–11.
46. Ibid., 10–11.
47. Law and Urry, ‘Enacting the Social’, 390; Aradau and Huysmans, ‘Critical Methods in
International Relations’, 607.
Bleiker 883

moving parts.48 Epistemological positions are then no longer linked to particular methods,
but to the value claims that are attached to them. A discourse analysis can be part of a posi-
tivist totality, just as a quantitative survey can become integrated into a post-positivist
approach – as long as the respective claims to knowledge are seen as contingent and are
not advanced in reference to an allegedly value-free and overall frame of reference.
The contours of a genuine multidisciplinary framework now become visible. Once the
logic of totality is forgone, it becomes possible to combine seemingly incompatible
methods, from ethnographies to semiologies and experiential surveys. The logics accord-
ing to which they operate do not necessarily have to be the same, nor do they have to add
up to one coherent whole. My position here differs from interdisciplinary approaches in
visual culture that promote multiple methods but then seek to unite them through a syn-
thesis, whether this is an ‘integrated framework’,49 a ‘systematic framework’50 or a
‘deeper holistic understanding of the world’.51
The approach I argue for understands method not as an internally consistent system
that can be united through a synthesis, but more like Deleuze and Guattari describe
assemblages: as a rhizome, a type of loose network of methodological connections that
has no central regulatory core but, instead, operates at various interconnected levels,
each moving and expanding simultaneously in different directions.52 Deleuze and
Guattari juxtapose rhizomes to roots or trees: hierarchical systems in which one becomes
two, in which everything can be traced back to the same origin. Roots and radicles may
shatter the linear unity of knowledge, but they hold on to a contrived system of thought,
to an image of the world in which the multiple always goes back to a centred and higher
unity. A rhizome works as an assemblage: it is not rooted, does not strive for a central
point. It grows sideways, has multiple entryways and exits. It has no beginning or end,
only a middle, from where it expands and overspills.

Understanding the Impact of Images beyond Causal Models

I have taken a slight detour from visual politics and outlined the foundations of a pluralist
framework that has the potential to understand how images work in complex ways across
their construction, content and impact. I now tackle a particularly challenging task that
opens up with such a move beyond an exclusive reliance on the type of social scientific
methods that have dominated international relations scholarship: the challenge of dem-
onstrating how exactly images matter politically.

48. DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society, 4; G. Marcus and E. Saka, ‘Assemblage’, Theory,
Culture, Society 2, nos. 2–3 (2006): 101; Graham Harman, ‘DeLanda’s Ontology: Assemblage
and Realism’, Continental Philosophical Review 41 (2008): 372–4.
49. Pauwels, ‘Visual Sociology Reframed’, 548.
50. Jon Prosser, ‘What Constitutes an Image-Based Qualitative Methodology?’, Visual Sociology
11, no. 2 (1996): 25.
51. William V II Faux and Heeman Kim, ‘Visual Representations of the Victims of Hurricane
Katrina’, Space and Culture 9, no. 1 (2006): 57.
52. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1996), 3–25, 377.
884 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 43(3)

We all know that images matter, but how do we actually know that what we know is
accurate? For instance, what is the exact political impact of an image – say, a photograph
of a tsunami victim on the front page of the New York Times? People around the world
are inevitably influenced by seeing a humanitarian tragedy depicted through the photo-
graph of a suffering individual. But what is the exact impact of this image and how are
we to assess it methodologically?
Prevailing social scientific methods assess impact through causal models. They
revolve around ‘a logic of stability and linear causality’.53 But there are only rare
instances where causality can be attributed to images. Consider one example: the debate
on the use of torture in the war against terror. As early as the summer of 2003 it
was publicly known – in part through reports from Amnesty International – that US
troops were using torture techniques when interrogating prisoners in Iraq. There was,
however, little public interest in or discussion about the issue. Domestic and international
outrage only emerged in the spring of 2004, in direct response to graphic photographs of
US torture at the Abu Ghraib prison facilities. The intensely emotional images of torture
managed to trigger major public discussions in a way that ‘mere’ words could not.
In most instances the power of images is far more difficult to identify through causal
mechanisms. This is even the case when the influence of images is obvious and uncon-
tested. It would be difficult, for instance, to retrace causal or even constitutive links
between the dramatic visual representations of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the emergence
of a discourse of evil and the ensuing war on terror. And yet, hardly anybody would
question that images were a key part of the nature and impact of 9/11 or, for that matter,
almost any political event.
Images work in complex ways, criss-crossing a range of geographical and temporal
boundaries – all the more since new technologies, from global media networks to new
media sources, now allow for an ever faster and easier circulation of images. To under-
stand the political dimensions of this process we need to supplement social scientific
models of causality with methodological strategies that acknowledge the multidirec-
tional and multifaceted dimension of political events.54
Images often work more indirectly, by performing the political, by setting the ‘condi-
tions of possibility’ through which politics takes place.55 They have the potential to shape
what can and cannot be seen, and thus also what can and cannot be thought, said and
done in politics. Consider, as an example, how a mixture of discourse and content analysis
can facilitate understanding of how media images have framed Australia’s approach to
refugees.56 Over a decade asylum seekers have primarily been represented as medium/
large groups and through a focus on boats. This visual framing, and in particular the

53. Joris Van Wezemael, ‘The Contribution of Assemblage Theory and Minor Politics for
Democratic Network Governance’, Planning Theory 7, no. 2 (2008): 169; see also Law and
Urry, ‘Enacting the Social’, 400.
54. Saskia Sassen, Territory Authority Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 405; Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An
Introduction to Actor–Network–Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
55. See Connolly, Identity/Difference.
56. Bleiker et al., ‘Visual Dehumanization of Refugees’.
Bleiker 885

relative absence of images that depict individual asylum seekers with recognisable facial
features, associates refugees not with a humanitarian challenge, but with threats to
sovereignty and security. But asserting a direct causal link to specific policy outcomes
would be impossible. And yet, a pluralist approach that draws on multiple methods can
reveal how these dehumanising visual patterns played a key political role by framing the
parameters of debates. In doing so, they reinforced a politics of fear that explains why
refugees are publicly perceived as people whose plight, dire as it is, nevertheless does not
generate a compassionate political response.
In situations where direct causality is impossible to ascertain one could perhaps speak
of ‘discursive causality’57 or ‘discursive agency’.58 Such an approach would retain a
notion of impact but acknowledge that images work gradually and across time and space:
their influence crosses numerous borders – spatial, linguistic, psychological and other
ones – and unfolds only gradually. Doing so illuminates how images work inaudibly but
powerfully: by slowly entrenching – or challenging – how we view, think of, and thus
also how we conduct, politics. Only a multitude of methods, qualitative and quantitative
ones, can attempt to stitch together the intricate and non-linear processes through which
visual factors shape the political.

Relativism, Reification and Situatedness

By drawing on but reaching beyond causal models, a pluralist method can offer key
insights into the impact of images. But this is only one example of how the complex
political role of images cannot be understood by one method alone or even by one meth-
odological standpoint. Only a combination of heterogeneous methods can hope to cap-
ture how images intersect across their construction, content and impact. But advancing
such a pluralistic methodological framework is neither easy nor uncontroversial, for it
breaks with deeply held assumptions in social scientific research and in international
relations scholarship in particular.
For many scholars the danger of relativism opens up as soon as one abandons a fixed
and universal standard of evidence. The assumption here is that social science proper
requires an internally coherent framework that can establish ‘facts about the real world’.59
Abandoning such a framework is said to undermine both scientific rigour and political
judgement.
Not so. Fears of relativism are misplaced. Several reasons stand out. To address them
it is necessary to momentarily move away from the specific study of images and address
larger issues that deal with how a pluralist methodological framework can assess the
complexity of world politics in a way that remains rigorous and politically insightful.
First, and most simply, there is no choice. We do not have access to methods that
somehow generate neutral and value-free knowledge. There is an overwhelming

57. Hansen, Security as Practice, 26.

58. Roland Bleiker, Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000), 208.
59. King et al., Designing Social Inquiry, 6.
886 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 43(3)

consensus among scholars who engage critically with methodology: they all point out
that methods are not and should not be seen as tools that reflect and represent realities.
Methods are inevitably embedded in social practices. While describing reality, they are
also, at the very same time, enacting and constituting this very reality. Methods inevita-
bly select and present the world from a particular perspective, one that conceals as much
as it reveals.60 This does not mean that realities do not exist and we can just make up
whatever we like. Rather, it requires recognising that making sense of the world inevita-
bly entails both material and social dimensions and that, as a result, ‘different methods
or practices tend to produce different realities’.61 This very recognition lies at the heart of
my suggestion to approach visual politics through a framework that allows multiple and
at times incompatible methods to coexist without having to answer to the same central
regulatory rules.
Second, rather than being doomed, a pluralist framework that accommodates multiple
and at times incompatible methods can serve as an antidote to one of the biggest chal-
lenges in international relations scholarship: ‘unchecked reification’. In making this
point, I draw on a recent and highly compelling study by Daniel Levine.62 Reification
refers to the widespread and dangerous process of forgetting the distinction between
concepts and the real-world phenomena they seek to depict. The dangers are real, Levine
stresses, for international relations scholars deal with some of the most difficult issues,
from genocides to war. Upholding one subjective position without critical scrutiny can
thus have far-reaching consequences. Assuming that the world cannot be known outside
of our human perceptions and the values that are inevitably intertwined with them,
Levine presents reification not as a flaw that can be expunged, but as a priority condition
for scholarship. The challenge then is not to let it go unchecked. Reification can be coun-
tered through what Levine calls a form of self-reflection, a kind of ongoing, inward-ori-
ented sensitivity to the ‘limitations of thought itself’.63
The benefits of drawing on a range of approaches, even incompatible ones, go far
beyond the opportunity to bring out nuances and new perspectives. Once the false hope
of a smooth synthesis has been abandoned, the very incompatibility of the respective
perspectives can then be used to identify the reifying tendencies in each of them. This is,
for Levine, how reification is being ‘checked at the source’, and this is how a ‘critically
reflexive moment might thus be rendered sustainable’.64 It is in this sense that Levine’s
approach is not really post-foundational but, rather, an attempt to ‘balance foundational-
ism’s against one another’.65 A scholar oscillates back and forth between different meth-
ods and paradigms, trying to understand the event in question from multiple perspectives.
No single method can ever adequately represent the event or should gain the upper hand.

60. Law and Urry, ‘Enacting the Social’, 392; Aradau and Huysmans, ‘Critical Methods in
International Relations’, 603, 608.
61. Law and Urry, ‘Enacting the Social’, 399.
62. Daniel J. Levine, Recovering International Relations: The Promise of Sustainable Critique
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
63. Ibid., 12.
64. Ibid., 103.
65. Ibid., 14.
Bleiker 887

But each should, in a way, recognise and capture details or perspectives that the others
cannot.66
Third, and finally, if each method performs and enacts the social world, then we need
as much awareness of this process as possible. Required, then, is an explicit engagement
with the situatedness of knowledge. A researcher cannot pretend that she or he had noth-
ing to do with the choice of method or the creation of data; that somehow all the informa-
tion had been there already and the research simply consisted of unearthing hidden gems
that are then presented in their original authenticity to a reader.
The issues at stake here are particularly pertinent when it comes to the study of visual
politics. Images always need to be interpreted. They have no meaning on their own.
Their meaning is contingent on other images and on the verbal context in which they are
embedded. There is, thus, always a leap of meaning that forces a scholar to offer a par-
ticular interpretation. This interpretation is never definitive. It is always linked to par-
ticular methodological choices.
Rather than hiding the choices made in the interpretation of images, scholars should
expose them and lay bare the paths taken and forgone. This is why Sarah Pink stresses
that for visually oriented researchers ‘reflexivity should be integrated fully into pro-
cesses of fieldwork and visual or written representation in ways that do not simply
explain the researchers’ approach but reveal the very processes by which the positional-
ity of researcher and informant were constituted and through which knowledge was pro-
duced during fieldwork’.67 Such forms of reflexivity are not only pertinent to field
research but apply to all methods, whether field-, archive- or text-based.68 But in all of
these and other cases, self-reflectivity will always remain incomplete. The very nature of
discourse is that there is no outside: we are inevitably caught in a web of meanings and
we can only be aware of part of them.
For some scholars such forms of reflective situatedness must be supplemented with
an additional component. Drawing on Jackson,69 Cecilie Basberg Neumann and Iver
Neumann stress the need to distinguish between the above-described reflexivist situat-
edness and a second one they call ‘analyticist’. These two are located at the ‘opposite
ends of the researcher/informant relationship’: the former is about awareness of how
the researcher is influenced by his or her environment, while the latter focuses on how

66. Ibid., 102.

67. Pink, ‘Interdisciplinary Agendas’, 189; Sarah Pink, Doing Visual Ethnography: Images,
Media and Representation in Research (London: Sage, 2001); Sarah Pink, ‘More Visualising,
More Methodologies: On Video, Reflexivity and Qualitative Research’, Sociological Review
49, no. 4 (2001): 586–99.
68. See Morgan Brigg and Roland Bleiker, ‘Autoethnographic International Relations: Exploring
the Self as a Source of Research’, Review of International Studies 36, no. 3 (2010): 779–
98; Andrew Moravcsik, ‘Trust, but Verify: The Transparency Revolution and Qualitative
International Relations’, Security Studies 34, no. 4 (2014): 663–88; Can E. Mutlu and Mark
B. Salter, ‘Commensurability of Research Methods in Critical Security Studies’, Critical
Security Studies 2, no. 2 (2014): 354.
69. Jackson, Conduct of Inquiry.
888 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 43(3)

‘the researcher affects the informants’ and the research environment in general.70 As
Smith puts it in the context of indigenous research methods, whose interest does the
research serve? How and to whom will it be distributed and with what consequences?71
Law and Urry had already drawn attention to this distinction, though they depict it as
a move from epistemology (how the researcher is shaped by context) to ontology (how
a researcher enacts and shapes a world72). I see these two approaches as not as tension-
fraught as others do. For me the former is part of the process that leads to the latter,
with both of them highlighting different aspects and consequences of situated
knowledge.

Conclusion
The main objective of this article has been to outline the contours of a methodological
framework that can assess the increasingly complex role that images play in global
politics. I started with a simple proposition: that a range of different methods are nec-
essary to understand the construction, nature and impact of images. Although seem-
ingly uncontroversial, such a proposal faces significant practical obstacles. This is in
part why scholars in visual culture have long debated whether the study of images
should be a disciplinary or an interdisciplinary scholarly endeavour.73 Multidisciplinarity
might be in academic fashion, but international relations scholars who embark on
related research face numerous difficulties. They range from disciplinary-bound pub-
lication practices of key journals to the perception that a scholar who navigates multi-
ple bodies of knowledge cannot possibly acquire the level of expertise of a specialist.
Add to this a persistent antagonistic divide between scholars who advocate quantita-
tive and those who advocate qualitative methods. They often live in different scholarly
worlds – worlds that are separated by the training scholars receive, the outlet where
they publish and the kinds of scholarly projects they embark on. Crossing the lines
between these two traditions is not easy, in part because it requires a broad methodo-
logical training that most scholars do not have, in part because it triggers a misleading
epistemological battle between positivists and post-positivists. I have shown that these
epistemological issues are not linked to the methods scholars employ but to the values
that they attach to the results of their research.
I then defended my pluralist methodological framework as the most plausible way to
understand how images work across three overlapping realms: their production, their
content and their impact. The complex realm of visual politics cannot be appropriately
understood through a single method or even a methodological framework that revolves
around an internally coherent and closed logic.

70. Cecilie Basberg Neumann and Iver Neumann, ‘Uses of the Self: Two Ways of Thinking about
Scholarly Situatedness and Method,’ Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 43, no. 3
(2015): 798–819.
71. Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 10.
72. Law and Urry, ‘Enacting the Social’, 397.
73. Mieke Bal, ‘Visual Essentialism and the Object of Visual Culture’, Journal of Visual Culture
2, no. 1 (2003): 5–32; Elkins, ‘Nine Modes’, 232–7.
Bleiker 889

The key argument I have made is that different methods need to be given the
chance to work based on their own logic, even if they are not compatible with an
overall set of rules. I then illustrated the issues at stake with regard to the political
impact of images. Images clearly play a key role in global politics. Images are abso-
lutely essential to understanding, for instance, the impact of a terrorist attack, the soli-
darity that emerges after a natural disaster or the dynamics that unfold during an
election campaign. These and countless other political phenomena cannot be sepa-
rated from the manner in which they are visualised in both old and new media sources.
But images only rarely cause political events directly. Prevailing cause–effect models
are thus only of limited use. Images work indirectly, across space and time. It is only
through a combination of multiple and at times incompatible methods that we can
understand how images frame the conditions of possibility; how they influence what
can and cannot be seen, thought and discussed; in short, how they delineate and shape
the political.
My methodological reflections on visual global politics have inevitably been long on
epistemology and short on ontology. This is to say that I have spent more time on identi-
fying methodological challenges and offering solutions to them than I have on exploring
the actual political content and consequences of images. This is in part due to the limits
set by a short article, in part the result of recognising that questions of method are the
precondition for understanding the politics of images. Methods are not just technical
issues. They are about how we know the world and how this knowledge is part and parcel
of the very political phenomena we seek to understand.
I devoted the final part of the article to addressing what is the biggest possible objec-
tion to the type of multidisciplinary approach I have outlined: the fear of relativism that
opens up once one abandons a foundational framework from where everything can be
judged in a standard, internally coherent manner. This fear is not only misplaced but also
misses out on how using a multitude of methods, even incompatible ones, can play a key
role in countering a far greater problem: the reifying tendency to forget how we, as schol-
ars, inevitably impose our subjective position upon a far more complex political world.
The hubris of thinking that one can possess definitive and indisputable knowledge is
significantly more dangerous than a clash of different perspectives. Indeed, the very
combination of incompatible methods makes us constantly aware of our own contingent
standpoints, so much so that we can gain the kind of scholarly humbleness and self-
reflectiveness required to approach the world of visual politics in all of its nuances and
complexities.

Acknowledgements
I am grateful for insightful comments from two exceptionally thorough referees and from Bill
Callahan, Shine Choi, Costas Constantinou, James Der Derian, Constance Duncombe, Lene
Hansen, Iver Neumann, Erzsebet Strausz and audience members at the Universities of Cyprus,
Sydney and Warwick as well as the Millennium conference in London in October 2014. Special
thanks to David Campbell and Emma Hutchison for feedback on this text and for our stimulating
research collaboration on the topic of this article.
890 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 43(3)

Funding
This research has been supported by a Discovery Grant from the Australian Research Council on
‘How Images Shape Responses to Humanitarian Crises’ (DP220100546).

Author Biography
Roland Bleiker is Professor of International Relations at the University of Queensland. His current
research examines how images, and the emotions they engender, shape responses to humanitarian
crises. Recent publications include Aesthetics and World Politics (Palgrave, 2009/2012) and, as
co-editor, a forum on ‘Emotions and World Politics’ in International Theory (vol. 3, 2014).